One day before the Arakha Army (AA) announced its capture of northern Rakhine State’s Buthidaung on Saturday, the town’s large Rohingya population were warned to leave, according to sources with ties to the community.
Located near Myanmar’s border with Bangladesh, Buthidaung is home to tens of thousands of Rohingya Muslims.
At around 4pm on May 17, a 30-year-old Rohingya man who had previously left the state received a call from his father, still in Buthidaung, warning of escalating tension.
“‘Son, the situation is getting worse,’” he recalled his father telling him during the seven-minute call. “‘We don’t know if we will still be alive after tonight.”
His father also said that on the same day, a nearby high school sheltering hundreds of displaced people had been hit by a bomb believed to have been dropped from a drone.
While initial. . .
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